Well, yes, if by "failing in every respect to disarm Saddam" you mean, "failing in every respect to 'disarm' the fifty totalitarian regimes that happen to occupy the planet. We're not the world's fucking policeman, okay? US-led coups have really really bad histories of backfiring on us. (see Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, most of Latin America, Cuba...)
Y'see, civilized people don't "disarm" countries who aren't a threat to us or to our friends. Clinton had a plan to invade Iraq, just he was never forced to use it, and he *certainly* didn't *make* the opportunity to use it.
Oh yeah, and he allowed Israel and India and Pakistan to develop nukes too. What, we have some monopoly on intelligence? Obviously not.
Clinton also worked to unify the Koreas, something we've wanted to do since the 50s, tried and failed to do by force, and *almost* managed to do with diplomacy before Bush FUBARed things with his "Axis of Evil" speech. Seriously, that impromptu poll the reporter took before the elections where Bush couldn't name one major world leader was prescient -- the man is a foriegn policy nightmare.
You do realize that when Clinton handed Bush the reigns of the US, the world *wasn't* rapidly spiralling into the maw of its destruction? If Bush really wanted peace, he would've prosecuted this war very differently than he has.
Think about it -- Bush hasn't even said "it's a step in the right direction" whenever Saddam makes a move to let inspectors back in or destroys missles or whatever. Always Bush is saying, "he's lying, he's a scumbag SOB and we need to kill him now". So, if you're Saddam, you think, "He wants me to destroy my weapons so he can invade. Like Hell." Which isn't an unreasonable position to take.
Ever since Bush started talking war in February of 2002, he has *made* *sure* that there would be no other possible outcome.
The fact that the Iraqi people themselves have embraced our troops as they've been liberated is wonderful. We're doing a good thing here...
Ummm... so, yeah, you have knowledge of this how? It hasn't been in any of the news accounts I've read, though a lot have *surrendered*, which is totally different from strewing the palm branches, etc. etc.
Say hello to those Iraqis as you go rolling through Baghdad... same to Elvis, Bigfoot, and the space aliens that built the Great Pyramid. I wonder why US High Command is letting an obviously knowledgeable soldier like you post on Slashdot?
Saddam comparable to Hitler? Yeah right. Hitler killed 13 million people in the Holocaust alone; Saddam hasn't come *near*. And how do you measure "evilness" if not in the number of lives he's destroyed, his capability and intelligence. Or are you standing next to Saddam's body with your handy-dandy Tricorder Plus (now with Evilness measurement capability!) and can see that his fast falling 'evilness' stat greatly exceeds that of Der Fuhrer?
Yeah, what was the last country Saddam invaded after Kuwait in the early 1990s? Oh, there wasn't one? Sorry about that. How many countries did *Hitler* invade again? Lets see, Czechoslovakia, Austria, the Rhineland, parts of North Africa, Poland... Saddam >= Hitler how again?
"But he gassed his own people -- the Kurds!" Whoa, there, pardner... the Kurds and Saddam have *never* gotten along, which is why they have a semi-autonomous region in N Iraq. Oh, and what did the US have to say about that gassing right after it happened? Nothing. Nil. Nada. A grand total of zero press releases condemning his actions, because in the politics of the times, the US didn't like the Kurds either because they were fighting for someone we didn't like, so we just ignored that atrocity until it became politicaly useful.
Saddam *has* changed his ways to some extent (not invading anyone b/c the US would take him down if he did), and there's a lot of uncertainty about exactly how much he has in the way of WMD. If anyone hasn't changed their ways, it's the US. Care to guess how many (oftentimes *democratically-elected*) leaders we've deposed over the past fifty years? The number is staggeringly large. This is just another example of it.
Nobody is denying that Saddam's done nasty anti-human-rights stuff (so what about the human rights abuses of China or North Korea or Pakistan or Saudi Arabia or...).
This war (to appropriate a quote from a different nasty pathetic little war -- Korea) is the wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time.
War is not the f--king answer here, people. Remember when North Korea and South Korea walked in under the same flag at the Olympics? Now North Korea is scarily belligerent. Iran was slowly liberalizing -- now they're pissed off at us and conservative again. While Bush handled the China-spy-plane incident with great aplomb, post-9/11 he's thrown away all the diplomacy Clinton did with his "Axis of Evil" and his made-up war with Iraq.
Regime change begins at home! Vote for anybody *but* Bush in 2004!
It's still possible to oppose the war, pray for our troops to come home safely, and, I would add, pray for as few Iraqi casualties as possible.
Even us "liberal tree-huggers" seem to forget that the US is going to be killing Iraqis in this war, many of whom have done *nothing* to warrant their destruction.
The feeling I've been getting from people -- even @@#$% Daschle -- is that the doves need to keep their heads down and their mouths shut and "support the troops". This is exactly the thing we *shouldn't* do. I can support the troops -- it isn't their fault Bush started this war -- but I can't sit down and shut up. We can still raise awareness of the people Bush is holding without bail or representation, the abomination of the PATRIOT Act, and all the crap this administration has pulled. And we should continue to raise Hell while this war is going on. Don't "shut up" for nobody.
And do pray for everyone who will die in this war. Pray LOTS.
_Spirited Away_ was indeed nominated for the Best Animated Feature award, so we'd best resort to hoping and praying that Disney's goons don't bend a few voters' arms to keep it from winning.
I watched a poor-quality fansub ('alright' for 'all right'), so I missed a lot the first time through and I'm really looking forward to the dubbed version on the DVDs. Dangit, Disney, I live in the frelling Midwest -- KaZaA was the only reason I saw it. I would have had to drive five hours to see it on a big screen! Publicize the film a little *more*, why don't you? (/sarcasm)
Actually, they seem to want to treat *all* animation that way, period. _Spirited Away_ really deserves a Best Picture nod, IMHO. Then again, i'm biased. _The Hours_? Jeez.
I agree with the poster upthread who said, okay, let's give one for best character portrayal, so if it's a live-action the actor stands up, and if it's CG w/ actor the actor and the animators stand up, and if it's cel or CG animation w/o mocap, the animation team stands up. Might be hard to fit all of Pixar on stage, tho... Then one for best cinematography, which basically means who told their story most artfully, and so on. The Oscars, self-congratulatory though it may be, does need to change with the times.
They don't *currently*, but they did eighty years ago. The binding on my history book is currently being repaired or I could give you exact figures, but IIRC something like 80% of eligible voters cast their ballots in the Teens and Twenties. *That*, my friends, is a Mandate. What our current President has (and what pretty much every president since FDR has had) is a kind-of sort-of vote of confidence from the people he pays the most. [cynicism=off]
Umm... I don't suppose it ever occured to you that she was talking to a *reporter*??? The people who have trouble quoting politicians correctly, much less MIT graduate students who probably have genius-level IQ's?
Some people find it helpful to talk on the level of the people they're conversing with -- "y'see this cable? well, the cable's got this little pointy part that needs to go up, see, and we stick it in *here* like *this*..." instead of "so you put the IDE cable in the HDD, remembering to observe orientation..."
Hmm... just a brief browsing of the docs suggests it works on *nix systems, which in theory includes BSD, and it is known to work on Mac OS X. I agree that there's probably some way Brilliant retains control over the network without requiring every client to download a new version -- if I was a scumball spyware-peddling P2P app creator, I'd include some kind of back door. Any script kiddie that finds it could have some fun.
This sounds like exactly what the giFT folks were trying to do. They had their client interoperating, but Brilliant released a new version of KaZaA that broke it, so they got fed up and created their own (very nice, IMO) network based off the FastTrack idea. The same thing will probably happen to the projectfasttrack folks; the KaZaA folks don't want *anyone* else using their network, so it will be a Microsoft-style arms race times ten.
giFT/OpenFT tends to cater to the geek crowd right now since they don't release binaries, you have to understand CVS and keep up to date, and the best GUI is curses-based. That means you'll find more anime than Brittany Speers, but it's quick, reliable, and works great on Linux. (not affiliated, just a happy user:)
There cannot be such a thing as "preference overload" because you only set preferences once, but use features daily.
Sigh... I bow before your 1337n355...
Believe me, I have seen Hell and it is preference overload.
I'm a geek. I consider myself to be a geek. I'm not afraid of things I don't understand. It took me five months to install Linux, but I stuck with it.
Recomplining my kernel was enough to leave me quivering on the floor mumbling "math coprocessor... i386 instruction set... Minix filesystem..."
*That*, my trollish friend, is preference overload. Certainly, I can learn what each configuration option does and become a 1337 h4>0rm31573r such as yourself. The thing is, *I* *shouldn't* *have* *to*. Even something as simple as showing me "this is how your kernel is *currently* configured" so I could be sure I wasn't *breaking* anything would have gone a long way to alleviating my discomfort.
Or look at Grip -- welcome to UI Hell. Tabs??? For the love of God, why? It took me a while to tweak the settings so it worked consistently for me, and every time I reworked something I had to wade through "Rip nice value", "Max nonencoded.wavs", and other things I wasn't likely to ever change. It only takes ten seconds longer if you know which preferences don't matter.
Y'see, if the default configuration is fscking broken, you *have* to learn the prefs if you want to get something done. It's a royal PITA. Even if it isn't, the more commonly used preferences shouldn't be embedded in amongst the more esoteric ones. MS Office succeeds because it doesn't force you to wade through the prefs to get stuff done. That's really the big push I'm seeing from people like Havoc Pennington -- pick rational defaults.
Also, reducing the options available in a program doesn't mean actually eliminating the options. More power-user type options are probably better left in text-based configuration files, because configuration dialogs get really overloaded with 100 checkboxes. This, again, seems to be the big thrust of gconf.
Believe me, grip would be a lot more successful if it didn't have so many fscking options. I used Enlightenment for a while, and if you like the options you're more than free to use it too. Myself, though, I switched to Metacity and never looked back.
like danny glover said at a rally "the Iraqi people should have the power to choose their own leader. the US should not choose one for them!!!"
movie stars and rock stars are so smart!!!
Yeah, just like those stupid dumbfuck Iraqis...
Read "Our Hopes Betrayed", by an Iraqi who would like to have a say in his new government, since he didn't have a say in his old one. Duh.
This whole "attacking a country that hasn't attacked you without a U.S. peacekeeping mandate" thing just smacks of U.S. imperialism/Manifest Destiny stuff, which makes me extremely queasy. On the other hand, Bush could do a *lot* that would increase my support for his little pet war, but it would enatail admitting he, his father, and Presidents Reagan and Clinton were wrong occasionally. Ie., it'll take some moral backbone; I'm not holding my breath.
Here's what I want to see from Bush, Jr. before we go to war:
1. Recognition that the U.S. helped make Saddam the monster he is. (The U.S. government withdrew support not once but *twice* from Iraqi insurrections. That's why there's so little opposition in Iraq anymore -- they all got killed. Not only that, we gave him chemical and biological agents, and didn't give a damn when he used them on the Kurds. The only reason Bush cares now is that it makes for a nice soundbite.)
2. The admission that Saddam doesn't have provable ties to September 11th or al-Quaeda.
3. Fulfillment of our obligations to Afghanistan, and doing something similar with regard to Iraq. (ie., "sorry General Franks, but we want an Iraqi leading the Iraqi government.")
4. A formal declaration of war would be nice... as if it'll happen. This isn't necessary, but these undeclared wars (*cough*Vietnam*cough*Korea*cough*Gulf-War-I*cough ) get on my nerves.
5. I know this last one is a long shot, and if the first three happen it matters less to me. Still, I'd appreciate it if Bush wouldn't "go it alone", since if he fucks it up we're in for six (or ten or twenty) more years of Anti-Americanism from the rest of the world, especially our former allies (France, Germany, etc.). If *anything* goes wrong, anyone who supported him (Blair, et al.) is going to be politically dead come next election, and someone who is virulently anti-American will take his place.
The UN only becomes a "toothless debating society" if Bush refuses to abide by their resolution, and the blackmail he's engaging in with Mexico and other countries that are still undecided doesn't bode well. He could also show some good faith by ratifying one of those 11 international treaties he's blown off since becoming President. Tit-for-tat, Mr. Bush; if you want their support you need to give them a bone.
It takes a big man to admit he is wrong occasionally, but that's just what Bush needs to do.
The difference between Hitler and Saddam Hussein is that Hitler invaded the Sudetenland, Chekloslovakia, Poland, Northern Africa, and Austria before anybody did anything other than "appeasement". If Hitler had invaded Britain (and he certainly could have), he could have overrun the rest of Africa and would have eventually set his sights on the U.S. and Russia.
Saddam Hussein right after he invaded Kuwait was sorta-kinda like Hitler. Saddam Hussein right now is a toothless old man. Bush doesn't give a flying fuck about what Saddam or any other totalitarian leader does to his people -- remember those al-Quaeda people tortured and killed in Afghanistan? How about our buddy-buddy relationship with China or Pakistan -- Musharraf basically threw the Pakistani constitution out the window, and he's openly tested nuclear weapons. Where does the administration come out against that?
Unlike the U.S., where teenagers listen to Eminem and punk rock, do drugs, drink, smoke, have sex... all trying to rebel by doing the same thing at the same time. Fucking hopeless.
(wink)
You make a good point, by the way. The U.S. is blessed with musical diversity -- Celtic-meets-punk-rock group Flogging Molly is my current favorite example of the weird-but-strangely-good in the American music scene (assuming your taste runs to Celtic-meets-punk-rock). I'm not associated with them in any way, but a friend downloaded some of their stuff and I was hooked pretty quick.
I think the mod you're going for it "+1 Sarcastic", people.
Conformity is bad, though bathing and smiling are positive things... hmmm, "sell-out"... I don't think the original poster meant for this to be taken seriously.
Oh, and by the way, congrats to Mr. Probst on confusing Slashdot moderators... not like that's *too* challenging... (wink)
And if they could rework Blogger to work with Mozilla, I'd be even happier.
Even better yet, give those of us with command-line skills the ability to post to our weblogs without using the Web interface at all! Can you imagine the proliferation of programs to automate weblog-posting through Google that would result if they were to do something similar to their Google API?
I *read* the story the last time it was linked, and I *read* the press release, and at least one person mentioned something to the effect that Microsoft's "bork" was actually an attempt to correct for an *Opera* bug. That is, MS may have been actually trying to play nice for once!
Now, I'm no fan of Microsoft, but I don't really have any reason to believe this is anything more than an honest mistake on their part, and I'm not sure what "Bork! Bork! Bork!"-ing MSN accomplishes. It doesn't seem terribly productive, but if it makes the developers feel better, that's fine with me.:)
I don't know, I guess this strikes me as petty somehow. Does anyone know if the Opera team tried to contact Microsoft to fix the problem? You know, the old "Never ascribe to stupidity that which is adequately explained by incompetence." And of course we all know that Microsoft is *never* incompetent... no sirree, not a bit! (/sarcasm)
I think that's perhaps among the best ideas I've heard since even before Columbia blew herself all to Hell.
The one thing I would change -- make the "Apollo fund", in the tradition of its namesake, a fund to answer Mr. Benford's questions of living for long periods in zero-gee and keeping our wastes to ourselves, with the goal of actually heading back to the moon and eventually to Mars, and plow the safety mechanisms and propulsion schemes into the "Challenger Fund".
A Mars mission would probably require significant government coordination, but I like the ideas.:)
(These opinions offered just on the off-chance you're an aerospace-contractor lobbyist or someone else with the power to make it happen.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Well, yes, if by "failing in every respect to disarm Saddam" you mean, "failing in every respect to 'disarm' the fifty totalitarian regimes that happen to occupy the planet. We're not the world's fucking policeman, okay? US-led coups have really really bad histories of backfiring on us. (see Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, most of Latin America, Cuba...)
Y'see, civilized people don't "disarm" countries who aren't a threat to us or to our friends. Clinton had a plan to invade Iraq, just he was never forced to use it, and he *certainly* didn't *make* the opportunity to use it.
Oh yeah, and he allowed Israel and India and Pakistan to develop nukes too. What, we have some monopoly on intelligence? Obviously not.
Clinton also worked to unify the Koreas, something we've wanted to do since the 50s, tried and failed to do by force, and *almost* managed to do with diplomacy before Bush FUBARed things with his "Axis of Evil" speech. Seriously, that impromptu poll the reporter took before the elections where Bush couldn't name one major world leader was prescient -- the man is a foriegn policy nightmare.
You do realize that when Clinton handed Bush the reigns of the US, the world *wasn't* rapidly spiralling into the maw of its destruction? If Bush really wanted peace, he would've prosecuted this war very differently than he has.
Think about it -- Bush hasn't even said "it's a step in the right direction" whenever Saddam makes a move to let inspectors back in or destroys missles or whatever. Always Bush is saying, "he's lying, he's a scumbag SOB and we need to kill him now". So, if you're Saddam, you think, "He wants me to destroy my weapons so he can invade. Like Hell." Which isn't an unreasonable position to take.
Ever since Bush started talking war in February of 2002, he has *made* *sure* that there would be no other possible outcome.
Regime change begins at home!
The fact that the Iraqi people themselves have embraced our troops as they've been liberated is wonderful. We're doing a good thing here...
Ummm... so, yeah, you have knowledge of this how? It hasn't been in any of the news accounts I've read, though a lot have *surrendered*, which is totally different from strewing the palm branches, etc. etc.
Say hello to those Iraqis as you go rolling through Baghdad... same to Elvis, Bigfoot, and the space aliens that built the Great Pyramid. I wonder why US High Command is letting an obviously knowledgeable soldier like you post on Slashdot?
Saddam comparable to Hitler? Yeah right. Hitler killed 13 million people in the Holocaust alone; Saddam hasn't come *near*. And how do you measure "evilness" if not in the number of lives he's destroyed, his capability and intelligence. Or are you standing next to Saddam's body with your handy-dandy Tricorder Plus (now with Evilness measurement capability!) and can see that his fast falling 'evilness' stat greatly exceeds that of Der Fuhrer?
Yeah, what was the last country Saddam invaded after Kuwait in the early 1990s? Oh, there wasn't one? Sorry about that. How many countries did *Hitler* invade again? Lets see, Czechoslovakia, Austria, the Rhineland, parts of North Africa, Poland... Saddam >= Hitler how again?
"But he gassed his own people -- the Kurds!" Whoa, there, pardner... the Kurds and Saddam have *never* gotten along, which is why they have a semi-autonomous region in N Iraq. Oh, and what did the US have to say about that gassing right after it happened? Nothing. Nil. Nada. A grand total of zero press releases condemning his actions, because in the politics of the times, the US didn't like the Kurds either because they were fighting for someone we didn't like, so we just ignored that atrocity until it became politicaly useful.
Saddam *has* changed his ways to some extent (not invading anyone b/c the US would take him down if he did), and there's a lot of uncertainty about exactly how much he has in the way of WMD. If anyone hasn't changed their ways, it's the US. Care to guess how many (oftentimes *democratically-elected*) leaders we've deposed over the past fifty years? The number is staggeringly large. This is just another example of it.
Nobody is denying that Saddam's done nasty anti-human-rights stuff (so what about the human rights abuses of China or North Korea or Pakistan or Saudi Arabia or...).
This war (to appropriate a quote from a different nasty pathetic little war -- Korea) is the wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time.
War is not the f--king answer here, people. Remember when North Korea and South Korea walked in under the same flag at the Olympics? Now North Korea is scarily belligerent. Iran was slowly liberalizing -- now they're pissed off at us and conservative again. While Bush handled the China-spy-plane incident with great aplomb, post-9/11 he's thrown away all the diplomacy Clinton did with his "Axis of Evil" and his made-up war with Iraq.
Regime change begins at home! Vote for anybody *but* Bush in 2004!
it's never too late for talk... seriously.
It's still possible to oppose the war, pray for our troops to come home safely, and, I would add, pray for as few Iraqi casualties as possible.
Even us "liberal tree-huggers" seem to forget that the US is going to be killing Iraqis in this war, many of whom have done *nothing* to warrant their destruction.
The feeling I've been getting from people -- even @@#$% Daschle -- is that the doves need to keep their heads down and their mouths shut and "support the troops". This is exactly the thing we *shouldn't* do. I can support the troops -- it isn't their fault Bush started this war -- but I can't sit down and shut up. We can still raise awareness of the people Bush is holding without bail or representation, the abomination of the PATRIOT Act, and all the crap this administration has pulled. And we should continue to raise Hell while this war is going on. Don't "shut up" for nobody.
And do pray for everyone who will die in this war. Pray LOTS.
_Spirited Away_ was indeed nominated for the Best Animated Feature award, so we'd best resort to hoping and praying that Disney's goons don't bend a few voters' arms to keep it from winning.
I watched a poor-quality fansub ('alright' for 'all right'), so I missed a lot the first time through and I'm really looking forward to the dubbed version on the DVDs. Dangit, Disney, I live in the frelling Midwest -- KaZaA was the only reason I saw it. I would have had to drive five hours to see it on a big screen! Publicize the film a little *more*, why don't you? (/sarcasm)
Best Storytelling
Most Visually Impressive
Best Story
Best live-action
Best total CG
Best Cel Animated (hmm, may have a fair bit of crossover)
Best Movie of the Year (from previous three -- who cares if it's animated or not?)
umm... late night musings...
Actually, they seem to want to treat *all* animation that way, period. _Spirited Away_ really deserves a Best Picture nod, IMHO. Then again, i'm biased. _The Hours_? Jeez.
I agree with the poster upthread who said, okay, let's give one for best character portrayal, so if it's a live-action the actor stands up, and if it's CG w/ actor the actor and the animators stand up, and if it's cel or CG animation w/o mocap, the animation team stands up. Might be hard to fit all of Pixar on stage, tho... Then one for best cinematography, which basically means who told their story most artfully, and so on. The Oscars, self-congratulatory though it may be, does need to change with the times.
Hey, be glad you don't live in the Upper Midwest. I say "anime" and people reply, "gezundheit".
Or, "The fansub of _Spirited Away_ is great!"
"All right, if we step away slowly maybe he won't attack right away..."
Is there a snowball's chance of me *ever* seeing the MegaTokyo book in a bookstore? Nope. And the author/manga-ka is from frickin' Michigan!
They don't *currently*, but they did eighty years ago. The binding on my history book is currently being repaired or I could give you exact figures, but IIRC something like 80% of eligible voters cast their ballots in the Teens and Twenties. *That*, my friends, is a Mandate. What our current President has (and what pretty much every president since FDR has had) is a kind-of sort-of vote of confidence from the people he pays the most. [cynicism=off]
Umm... I don't suppose it ever occured to you that she was talking to a *reporter*??? The people who have trouble quoting politicians correctly, much less MIT graduate students who probably have genius-level IQ's?
Some people find it helpful to talk on the level of the people they're conversing with -- "y'see this cable? well, the cable's got this little pointy part that needs to go up, see, and we stick it in *here* like *this*..." instead of "so you put the IDE cable in the HDD, remembering to observe orientation..."
Hmm... just a brief browsing of the docs suggests it works on *nix systems, which in theory includes BSD, and it is known to work on Mac OS X. I agree that there's probably some way Brilliant retains control over the network without requiring every client to download a new version -- if I was a scumball spyware-peddling P2P app creator, I'd include some kind of back door. Any script kiddie that finds it could have some fun.
This sounds like exactly what the giFT folks were trying to do. They had their client interoperating, but Brilliant released a new version of KaZaA that broke it, so they got fed up and created their own (very nice, IMO) network based off the FastTrack idea. The same thing will probably happen to the projectfasttrack folks; the KaZaA folks don't want *anyone* else using their network, so it will be a Microsoft-style arms race times ten.
:)
giFT/OpenFT tends to cater to the geek crowd right now since they don't release binaries, you have to understand CVS and keep up to date, and the best GUI is curses-based. That means you'll find more anime than Brittany Speers, but it's quick, reliable, and works great on Linux. (not affiliated, just a happy user
Of course, the monsters are still ugly
Isn't that the whole point of them being monsters? (wink)
whoa -- sweet! Who says open-source can't be innovative? That looks great without copying Microsoft's stupid left-pane shortcuts idea.
Hmmm... might want to make sure the 'Save' dialog actually says 'Save' by that textbox, though. Ah, well.
There cannot be such a thing as "preference overload" because you only set preferences once, but use features daily.
.wavs", and other things I wasn't likely to ever change. It only takes ten seconds longer if you know which preferences don't matter.
Sigh... I bow before your 1337n355...
Believe me, I have seen Hell and it is preference overload.
I'm a geek. I consider myself to be a geek. I'm not afraid of things I don't understand. It took me five months to install Linux, but I stuck with it.
Recomplining my kernel was enough to leave me quivering on the floor mumbling "math coprocessor... i386 instruction set... Minix filesystem..."
*That*, my trollish friend, is preference overload. Certainly, I can learn what each configuration option does and become a 1337 h4>0rm31573r such as yourself. The thing is, *I* *shouldn't* *have* *to*. Even something as simple as showing me "this is how your kernel is *currently* configured" so I could be sure I wasn't *breaking* anything would have gone a long way to alleviating my discomfort.
Or look at Grip -- welcome to UI Hell. Tabs??? For the love of God, why? It took me a while to tweak the settings so it worked consistently for me, and every time I reworked something I had to wade through "Rip nice value", "Max nonencoded
Y'see, if the default configuration is fscking broken, you *have* to learn the prefs if you want to get something done. It's a royal PITA. Even if it isn't, the more commonly used preferences shouldn't be embedded in amongst the more esoteric ones. MS Office succeeds because it doesn't force you to wade through the prefs to get stuff done. That's really the big push I'm seeing from people like Havoc Pennington -- pick rational defaults.
Also, reducing the options available in a program doesn't mean actually eliminating the options. More power-user type options are probably better left in text-based configuration files, because configuration dialogs get really overloaded with 100 checkboxes. This, again, seems to be the big thrust of gconf.
Believe me, grip would be a lot more successful if it didn't have so many fscking options. I used Enlightenment for a while, and if you like the options you're more than free to use it too. Myself, though, I switched to Metacity and never looked back.
like danny glover said at a rally "the Iraqi people should have the power to choose their own leader. the US should not choose one for them!!!"
h ) get on my nerves.
movie stars and rock stars are so smart!!!
Yeah, just like those stupid dumbfuck Iraqis...
Read "Our Hopes Betrayed", by an Iraqi who would like to have a say in his new government, since he didn't have a say in his old one. Duh.
This whole "attacking a country that hasn't attacked you without a U.S. peacekeeping mandate" thing just smacks of U.S. imperialism/Manifest Destiny stuff, which makes me extremely queasy. On the other hand, Bush could do a *lot* that would increase my support for his little pet war, but it would enatail admitting he, his father, and Presidents Reagan and Clinton were wrong occasionally. Ie., it'll take some moral backbone; I'm not holding my breath.
Here's what I want to see from Bush, Jr. before we go to war:
1. Recognition that the U.S. helped make Saddam the monster he is. (The U.S. government withdrew support not once but *twice* from Iraqi insurrections. That's why there's so little opposition in Iraq anymore -- they all got killed. Not only that, we gave him chemical and biological agents, and didn't give a damn when he used them on the Kurds. The only reason Bush cares now is that it makes for a nice soundbite.)
2. The admission that Saddam doesn't have provable ties to September 11th or al-Quaeda.
3. Fulfillment of our obligations to Afghanistan, and doing something similar with regard to Iraq. (ie., "sorry General Franks, but we want an Iraqi leading the Iraqi government.")
4. A formal declaration of war would be nice... as if it'll happen. This isn't necessary, but these undeclared wars (*cough*Vietnam*cough*Korea*cough*Gulf-War-I*coug
5. I know this last one is a long shot, and if the first three happen it matters less to me. Still, I'd appreciate it if Bush wouldn't "go it alone", since if he fucks it up we're in for six (or ten or twenty) more years of Anti-Americanism from the rest of the world, especially our former allies (France, Germany, etc.). If *anything* goes wrong, anyone who supported him (Blair, et al.) is going to be politically dead come next election, and someone who is virulently anti-American will take his place.
The UN only becomes a "toothless debating society" if Bush refuses to abide by their resolution, and the blackmail he's engaging in with Mexico and other countries that are still undecided doesn't bode well. He could also show some good faith by ratifying one of those 11 international treaties he's blown off since becoming President. Tit-for-tat, Mr. Bush; if you want their support you need to give them a bone.
It takes a big man to admit he is wrong occasionally, but that's just what Bush needs to do.
The difference between Hitler and Saddam Hussein is that Hitler invaded the Sudetenland, Chekloslovakia, Poland, Northern Africa, and Austria before anybody did anything other than "appeasement". If Hitler had invaded Britain (and he certainly could have), he could have overrun the rest of Africa and would have eventually set his sights on the U.S. and Russia.
Saddam Hussein right after he invaded Kuwait was sorta-kinda like Hitler. Saddam Hussein right now is a toothless old man. Bush doesn't give a flying fuck about what Saddam or any other totalitarian leader does to his people -- remember those al-Quaeda people tortured and killed in Afghanistan? How about our buddy-buddy relationship with China or Pakistan -- Musharraf basically threw the Pakistani constitution out the window, and he's openly tested nuclear weapons. Where does the administration come out against that?
Iraq is just a convenient target right now.
Unlike the U.S., where teenagers listen to Eminem and punk rock, do drugs, drink, smoke, have sex... all trying to rebel by doing the same thing at the same time. Fucking hopeless.
(wink)
You make a good point, by the way. The U.S. is blessed with musical diversity -- Celtic-meets-punk-rock group Flogging Molly is my current favorite example of the weird-but-strangely-good in the American music scene (assuming your taste runs to Celtic-meets-punk-rock). I'm not associated with them in any way, but a friend downloaded some of their stuff and I was hooked pretty quick.
WTF?!? This is somehow "Insightful"??
I think the mod you're going for it "+1 Sarcastic", people.
Conformity is bad, though bathing and smiling are positive things... hmmm, "sell-out"... I don't think the original poster meant for this to be taken seriously.
Oh, and by the way, congrats to Mr. Probst on confusing Slashdot moderators... not like that's *too* challenging... (wink)
AMEN!!!
And if they could rework Blogger to work with Mozilla, I'd be even happier.
Even better yet, give those of us with command-line skills the ability to post to our weblogs without using the Web interface at all! Can you imagine the proliferation of programs to automate weblog-posting through Google that would result if they were to do something similar to their Google API?
Please, Mr. Brin, pleeeeease!
I *read* the story the last time it was linked, and I *read* the press release, and at least one person mentioned something to the effect that Microsoft's "bork" was actually an attempt to correct for an *Opera* bug. That is, MS may have been actually trying to play nice for once!
:)
Now, I'm no fan of Microsoft, but I don't really have any reason to believe this is anything more than an honest mistake on their part, and I'm not sure what "Bork! Bork! Bork!"-ing MSN accomplishes. It doesn't seem terribly productive, but if it makes the developers feel better, that's fine with me.
I think it was probably too early in the morning for me to appreciate the humor value...
1 w4n7 4 1337-5p33k m0zi114 p1|_|g1n! w00t!
Aha! That's the information I was looking for -- thanks. It's weird, but I guess that's Microsoft for you.
Ah, thanks. My quote doesn't make much sense, does it? :) ... too early in the morning ...
I don't know, I guess this strikes me as petty somehow. Does anyone know if the Opera team tried to contact Microsoft to fix the problem? You know, the old "Never ascribe to stupidity that which is adequately explained by incompetence." And of course we all know that Microsoft is *never* incompetent... no sirree, not a bit! (/sarcasm)
I think that's perhaps among the best ideas I've heard since even before Columbia blew herself all to Hell.
:)
:)
The one thing I would change -- make the "Apollo fund", in the tradition of its namesake, a fund to answer Mr. Benford's questions of living for long periods in zero-gee and keeping our wastes to ourselves, with the goal of actually heading back to the moon and eventually to Mars, and plow the safety mechanisms and propulsion schemes into the "Challenger Fund".
A Mars mission would probably require significant government coordination, but I like the ideas.
(These opinions offered just on the off-chance you're an aerospace-contractor lobbyist or someone else with the power to make it happen.